re your blushes, though
they never spared hers. There is a book, "Gli Ornamenti delle Donne,"
which will tell you what that bastion of a fair girl should be; and what
it should be those Paduan lyrists will more than assure you Ippolita's
was. Thus passionately they fingered every part, dwelling here, touching
there, with no word that was not a caress. What she had not, too, they
gave her--the attributes she sowed in them. She was "vagha," since they
longed; "lontana," since she kept them at a distance; "nascosa," since
they drove her to it; cold, since she dared not be warm.

The painters, not to be behind, expressed what the others hinted. She
saw herself, first, as _Daphne_ behind a laurel-bush--the artist,
kneeling in the open, offered his heart smoking upon a dish; second, as
_Luna_, standing in shrouded white on a crescent moon--the artist, as
_Endymion_, asleep in a rocky landscape, waiting to be kissed; third, as
_Leda_, naked in reeds beside her pair of eggs--the plumed artist near
by, ruffling and flapping his wings. Luckily, their allusiveness escaped
her; she knew nothing of the diversions of the ancient gods.

But of all the vantage she gave them, none equalled that for which her
gossips should have answered, her most commendable name of Ippolita. The
verses she received on that theme would have made a _Theseid_, those she
had to hear would have kept the rhapsodists for a twelve-month, those
she saw the very Sala del Consiglio could not have contained. Ippolita
at war with the Athenian, or leading her Amazons afield; Ippolita
turning her unmaimed side to an adoring warrior (the painter) and you,
or suckling Ippolita (with the artist's strongly marked features) in an
ivied ruin with peacocks about it; Ippolita in a colonnade at Athens on
the right hand of the king--thus she saw herself daily; thus the old
palace walls of Padua, if they could yield up their tinged secrets
through the coats of lime, would show her rosy limbs and crowned head.
Mantegna has her armoured, with greaves to the knee and spiked cups on
her breastplate. Gian Bellini carried her to Venice, to lead Scythians
in trousers against Theseus in plate-armour and a blazoned shield.
Giorgione set her burning in the shade, trying to cool her golden flank
in deep mosses by a well.

All this, and much more, Ippolita endured because she was a good as well
as a beautiful girl. Sometimes she wept in a friend's arms, sometimes
(really frightened) she